11/10/10

New Employment, of a Sort

My good friend Homer sent me an email a few days ago asking why I hadn't written a piece for my blog in the wake of the Republican semi-tsunami on election day a week ago. He explained that he, like myself, had walked to the polls on election day and he was interested to know my opinion about the results.

While I was gratified that he cared what I thought, the truth was that I wasn't quite sure what I thought. Lots of different ideas about what it meant were bouncing around in the void of my brain cavity but nothing profound was emerging from that black hole so I simply kept quiet for a change. It seemed superfluous to add my two cents to the thousands of other opinions that couldn't be avoided in any media, old or new, so I opted to "let it cook" for a while.

In the meantime I received a job offer, which after ten seconds of deep philosophical contemplation, I accepted. The offer had a catch of course, as everything nowadays seems to. Oh it's a real job for sure, but only in the same way as doing the "lock up" routine at church after all the people have gone home for the night is. And the catch is the same, it doesn't pay a red cent.

So it's a new job, of a sort. And even though I could use the money to defray the cost of the cat food we might be eating in a decade or so (due to the lack of a government pension like most of the "Chicago Way" citizens in these parts receive, and a penchant for spending every available nickle on greens fees), the important "pay" is the chance to make my contribution to the freedom movement more valuable and have a much wider audience for my humble essays than this blog provides. I'm happy to have the chance.

I have never met or talked to my new editors personally so I'm not sure what qualifications they perceived me to have other than a razor thin connection to the Cato Institute and a semi-acceptable level of written communication skills. All I know is the people who write for my new "employer", THL (The Humble Libertarian) blog share the same love of liberty as I and the commitment to do something about it.

I have been given the title of "Regular Columnist" and my responsibility is to submit articles of interest originating from the incredibly intelligent staff of the Cato Institute for THL's new project named Featured Voices. As many of you know, Cato is arguably the number one free market think tank in the world, and The Humble Libertarian is an up and coming blog which is exploding across the internet. Many of it's readers are younger future leaders and it is my honor to have an opportunity to speak to them through this contemporary medium.

Which brings me back to Homer's request about my thoughts on the recent election, sohere is what I think happened:

The "Progressive" agenda was roundly and loudly rejected.
Large numbers of Democrats were dismissed for supporting Obamacare, government takeovers and bailouts, TARP, pretend stimulus, and threatening huge taxes on energy because of the "global warming" fraud.
The people rejected massive new taxes in the scheme to let the so called "Bush Tax Cuts" expire.
The people are also scared stiff of possible coming hyper-inflation due to the federal reserve policy of printing money to finance huge unpayable government debts and new spending.
The people responded negatively to being called names by arrogant government operatives.
The people voted for the only anti-progressive option available to them.

And here is what I think did not happen:

People did not fall in love with Republicans.
People did not suddenly believe Republicans can fix all the problems they helped to create.
People did not think the economy will immediately turn around just because they repudiated Obama's agenda.
People did not believe that Tea Partiers are racists.

So what now?

My opinion is that we should support Republicans for now, but not embrace them unless/until they become small government constitutionalists.
We should prepare for the next round of primary elections very carefully so we can throw every single big government incumbent Republican off the next slate of candidates.
We should support every single Democrat candidate in the next primary who rejects the loony left vision of an American/European socialist form of government which minds everyone's business instead of supporting the old Democratic ideals of defending the rights of "the little guy."